1,364 founders, 663 companies, one day.

SaaStock Europe 2017 ran on a single day — September 20, 2017 — in Dublin. 1,364 attendees from 663 unique SaaS companies, more than double the inaugural 643 the year prior. It was the second SaaStock and, by total YouTube view count of the talks recorded that day, the richest pre-2022 edition of the conference. Five of the keynotes filmed at SaaStock 2017 have crossed 17,000 YouTube views in the years since — the strongest single-edition video performance of any SaaStock between 2016 and 2022.

The most-watched 2017 talk was Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo (CRO, TravelPerk) on customer onboarding — 25,518 views. His thesis: "The one thing all SaaS companies have in common is that unless we do the right onboarding, our customers will see no value in the software." Mark McLeod (Founder & MD, SurePath Capital Partners) — 14-year CFO of VC-backed startups including Shopify and FreshBooks, then GP at Canada's largest seed fund — followed with the second-most-watched 2017 talk at 24,207 views: how to build a massive SaaS business selling to SMEs, drawn from a decade of selling exclusively into that market.

David Skok (General Partner, Matrix Partners; author of forEntrepreneurs) anchored the third-most-watched session — "The SaaS founder's journey: what matters at each stage" at 24,020 views — using a three-phase diagram to simplify the one question every CEO grinds on: at each stage of the journey, what should you focus on, and how do you drive total alignment on what matters? Steli Efti (CEO & Co-founder, Close.io) followed at 20,089 views with the operator how-to on designing a killer SaaS sales call. David Darmanin (Founder & CEO, Hotjar) closed the top-five-by-views grouping at 17,653 views with the $0-to-$10M-in-one-straight-line growth engine and the personal story that started him on the path.

Tope Awotona (Founder & CEO, Calendly) gave the hybrid B2B/B2C SaaS keynote that previewed the company's eventual path past $250M ARR. Patrick Campbell delivered the second annual State of SaaS — by 2017 drawn from over 6,000 companies, twice the size of the 2016 dataset. Philippe Botteri (Partner, Accel) sat down with Ryan Smith (CEO, Qualtrics) for a fireside on building a SaaS unicorn — five months before SAP would acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion. Jacco van der Kooij (Winning by Design) made the case for sales as a science, Nathan Barry (Founder & CEO, ConvertKit) walked the bootstrap track through using direct sales to get to $8M ARR, and Carlos Hernandez (CEO, Quaderno) closed the international track from Gran Canaria with a bootstrapped European SaaS story. SaaStock Europe 2018 returned to Dublin the following October as the first SaaStock to break 2,000.